CCCclii LIFE OF BACON. 



while his companions were diverting themselves in the 

 park he was occupied in meditating upon the causes of 

 the echoes (a) and the nature of imagination, (b) In after 

 life he was a master of the science of harmony, (c) and 

 the laws of imagination he studied with peculiar care, (d) 

 and well understood. The same penetration he extended 

 to colours, (/) and to the heavenly bodies, (g) and predicted 



(a) See ante, page 3. (&) See note (t\ page 4. 



(c) Sir John Hawkins, in his History of Music, says, &quot; Lord Bacon, in 

 his Natural History has given a great variety of experiments touching 

 music, that shew him to have been, not barely a philosopher, an inquirer 

 into phenomena of sound, but a master of the science of harmony, and very 

 intimately acquainted with the precepts of musical composition.&quot; 



(d) See 10th Century of Sylva, vol. iv. See Stewart s Dissertation. 

 (/) See his solitary Instances in the Novum Organum. See p. 290. 



A rainbow and a piece of glass in a stable window both shew the prismatic 

 colours ; but there is nothing common between the rainbow and the stable 

 window, save this power of shewing the colour. Does not colour depend 

 upon the refractive power of these bodies ? 



(g) &quot; Quicunque enim superlunarium et sublunarium conficta divortia 

 contempserit, et materiae appetitus et passiones maxime catholicas (quse in 

 utroque globo validae sunt, et universitatem rerum transverberant) bene 

 perspexerit, is ex illis quae apud nos cernuntur luculentam capiet de rebus 

 ccelestibus informationem.&quot; 



Whoever shall reject the feigned divorces of superlunary and sublunary 

 bodies, and shall intentively observe the appetences of matter and the 

 most universal passions, which in either globe are exceeding potent, and 

 transverberate the universal nature of things, he shall receive clear informa 

 tion concerning celestial matters from the things seen here with us; and 

 contrariwise, from those motions which are practised in heaven, he shall 

 learn many observations which now are latent, touching the motion of 

 bodies here below, not only so far as their inferior motions are moderated 

 by superior, but in regard they have a mutual intercourse by passions 

 common to them both. 



&quot; We must openly profess that our hope of discovering the truth, with 

 regard to the celestial bodies, depends upon the observation of the common 

 properties, or the passions and appetites of the matter of both states; for, 

 as to the separation that is supposed betwixt the ethereal and sublunary 

 bodies, it seems to me no more than a fiction, and a degree of superstition 



